I wonder if it really was suicide:
When Mattel Inc. recalled nearly a million toys manufactured by Zhang Shuhong's company, he fought hard to find a way to resume sales to America. They were the lifeblood of his firm, Lee Der Industrial Co., Ltd., and its lucrative share of the export boom driving China's economic growth.It really makes you wonder how quick they would be to upset our economy. How many more suicides would they have if they lost America as a manufacturing partner and market?
But as Zhang's factories in the southern city of Foshan lay idle, workers started drifting off, fearing they would never start up again. Then Chinese authorities sealed Zhang's ruin by announcing Thursday that he was prohibited from exporting toys until further notice because of the defects denounced by Mattel.
Zhang was found dead in a company warehouse two days later, colleagues said Monday, apparently having hanged himself in despair. His death dramatized the high stakes in an international scare over unsafe Chinese products and an increasingly vigorous government crackdown designed to restore confidence in the vital export industry.
"I think the company is about to go bankrupt," said an executive of a Lee Der subsidiary who identified himself only as Wang. "Otherwise, he wouldn't have committed suicide."
[...]
Factories churning out U.S.-bound products, which sprawl across Foshan and most of the rest of Guangdong province, have played a key role in providing employment for millions of farm youths. The Communist Party government has come to rely on them for maintaining not only employment but also the swift economic expansion that has transformed the lives of China's 1.3 billion inhabitants.
As a result, officials have reacted strongly to the reports of dangerous food and other products exported under the Made in China label. After an initial period seeking to play down the problem, they have repeatedly announced moves to strengthen supervision and increase cooperation with U.S. safety authorities. One sequence on official China Central Television news showed smartly uniformed food safety inspectors running out of their offices like firemen responding to an alarm.
